Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Nestor Topchy is an artist in Houston. C. and I had scanned all the men in town at parties for artists before we settled on him. He was the only exciting man to be found, we said. There were two others, but they were married, and it's telling that at 23 and 28, C. and I would not teufel with married men. That would come later. There are many stories about Nestor, but I'll tell you two. One night C. and I drove my car toward Nestor's house in the Heights. I had noticed that my odometer was nearing 66,666. It was at 66,665. We circled the block three times to get the odometer to read 66,666.66 in front of his house, which was a compound in the weeds.

I called his girlfriend, Jan, when I heard they might be breaking up. C. already lived with her boyfriend, but this interest in Nestor didn't stop there. I admitted to Jan that I was interested in Nestor, but I wanted to hear it from her that they were breaking up. They were breaking up, she said, "but he really isn't interested in relationships." "Okay, sorry, thanks," I said and hung up. For years I thought I'd been a feminist about it in bringing it directly to her, but I also felt deeply awash in embarrassment over it. He's not interested in relationships, I said, and shut up.

Monday, November 17, 2008

L.H. would not remember this bec. she was not in school w/ us, but I had taken one look at B.P. and said, "no thank you" when the other graduate students urged me to believe that he would or could make or break our careers. A. says I like alcoholics best; here was one I didn't seem to like. He was an ad man from NY, and, as it turned out, not a very talented poet. I have a stubborn streak. Perhaps B.P. made it for E.W. but broke it for the rest of us. Who among us is tenured? E.W. B.P. is E.W.'s literary executor. Is T.L. tenured? Did T.L. go through B.P.? A. and R.H. say T.L. is a sociopath. Is T.L. "missing"? T.L. got A. her "job." Is M.M. still "missing"? Why did D.M. and M.M. and A.B. avoid drugs or not encounter them until 1993 – into their 30s? What was going on in 1993? That's when I met G. and saw A. there in her cocktail dress. G. was on coke in high school. A. reminds us that T.L.'s mother was schizophrenic. Am I still missing something? Was I "missing"? I was at home not writing. The therapist said repeatedly to write for therapy only, but it was counter to training, so I sat. Later I wrote about that. Six days at the psych. hospital in Houston, so I missed a few conversations. Do the women who published books remember B.P.? L.M. may be tenured. B.P. was after her time. Is my forgetting B.P. why I said the other day that I have a life, not a career -- I have a life, not a cigarette and coffee sobriety?

T. called B.P. the other day and put us on the phone together. We talked about squirrels. I told him that I was making a chapbook for someone in a chapbook collective, and he said that that sounded "creative." Does it? I'm just dropping someone else's work at the printer and paying for it. I'm not to the point of asking B.P. to read my poems.

Y'all may have heard A. say that only one of the poems in my present chapbook, my second, the one called "Borgo Was 29 on His Birthday" is glad to be female. A. likes that poem because it has the word "consumerism" in it, my suspicion, not because it is glad to be female. The female speaker remembers for him bec. he forgets -- is remembering female? and forgetting male? I thought the rememberer in "Head" enjoys watching him from his ceiling -- the man in the poem, who is stoned, yet atoned, in his 10th step, exactly where he started. A.'s husband likes my vanity poem, the one I wrote in 1983 but did not submit or buy until many years later, when I ordered in hardcover for my mother. My first published poem. I remember when I presented it to my mother, I said, "This is not prestigious." That vanity press had gotten even more flack than usual because with W.D. Snodgrass at the helm, and larger cash prizes than most prestigious grants, people might make the mistake of thinking it was prestigious. She laughed because she liked it, anyway. Touch of Tomorrow is the name of the volume.

Gals. Girls. Ladies. T. can't pronounce the plural and says "woman" for "women." L., my former "hick" friend whom A. met, says "gals." So she sings but doesn't write. She sings a drastically deep and sonorous form of the blues and tells everyone to kiss her white ass. She's 5'2" and 105 pounds – wh. is not fat, by the way. She dropped out of college at 79 pounds. She remembers witnessing the rape of her poodle when she was young by a much larger dog, a mutt. Then Coco had one baby. L.'s nose is African like my green eyes. She gets Brazilians. She doesn't like the Jewish people due to the day the school canceled Christmas. She can't forget it. She cried over it when she told the story to her Jewish woman friend, a bartender, who couldn't get enough of her. Many alcoholics in L.'s clan. Her dad was in the bar equipment and the bar business. He died at 32 of a heart attack, but some of the kids said he'd been shot at the airport. She is Catholic/Lutheran but nothing really, which is why it jolted her not to worship Christmas at school. It jolted me less, and I loved the dredel song. We went to Congregational church and had church music there, and my father was in the choir -- these two men years later, Mr. Soules, who'd had a brain tumor that had left a stitch near his mouth, and my father, Jack Bogle (not of Vanguard but of Gillette), whose prostate cancer had left him bereft but not without strength for the distance. He died in 1992, six months after my trip to the psych. ward and the same year B.P. got to Houston. His hair was gorgeous and shiny and jet black. And his father was of Scottish parents and brown.

When C. fantasized about mental hospitals, it was the gothic type that she'd seen in Camille Claudel. When A. dreams of it, it is what? The woman the AA group stoned to a pulp was Jewish. She'd been to Bellevue in high school for downers she'd bought on 14th St. after early rapes. My family went to all lengths to protect her from her violent husband. She ended up "relapsing" on drugs she'd never used before 19 years of AA, heroin for one. T. brags about heroin. He enacts shooting up. Does anyone go to NA? Is NA just plain out of style? I agreed to go once with a schizophrenic woman pot smoker from AA. Everyone was 17 years old. One man was 40. I said very nervously in that crowd something I wouldn't say today except at an AA meeting -- I was an alcoholic.

Saturday, November 08, 2008

My "husband" retorts with misogyny; he commits racial slurs to the air of the apartment where we live. We aren't married, as I keep telling myself, as I told myself then about men I hadn't married then, who weren't misogynist or racist, even when drunk. Men then were in our twenties and thirties. My favorite men were 33. They were my heroes. They ran off with my girlfriend, the same girlfriend, twice. When I was 33, my favorite men were 42 and 46. My favorite men now are 60 and 63. This "husband" I wish I could change is 51, but he says he's 60. Friends say he looks 65. He slurs everyone. He slurs all of humankind and pets. He insults male pets by not using their names, by calling them "his highness"; he calls "poor" men "dumbos" and "fatsos," and he calls women "her highness" to be polite, otherwise cunt: old cunt, dumb cunt, monkey cunt. He keeps it up for 16 hours in one day. One of my friends says it's due to his illness that he hates so openly when he's drunk, but I know that's when he lies most. Nothing he says drunk is reliable. I think it's being awake that bothers him. Being awake coincides with being drunk. He's kind in his sleep or when talking with certain men or when talking with men in his sleep or early in the morning before he drinks. I explain it that way.

My Republican summer fiance slurred no one politically except all mental cases (he himself had police force "combat" PTSD) and O.J. He had covered the Manson trial as a young radio reporter. He called the outcome of the O.J. trial -- that O.J. trial -- "murder for a fee."

I was writing gaily at this weblog during the month of October, quietly and gaily something about men who don't love enough in their sacred, guarded places, places everywhere that resemble the worlds of finance and business, until I had an attack of self-consciousness. What was exposed were the highs and lows of writing, the elation of inspiration, the clumsiness of not knowing the effect of the writing, yet the fear of patriarchy, the hierarchy of the literary marketplace, the hierarchy of the academy. Knowing that hiding that is adequate in poetry.

I-dot-I-dot-ippi

A friend feels that she has sacred, dark places that after years of self-probing only an expensive man psychiatrist could understand. She feels that I have obvious self-inflicted wounds that any team of nuns could smudge with a pillow.

Thursday, November 06, 2008

I cry with a hard joy, a rockin' blues joy when our team wins. I cried, shouted, and jumped for joy on Tuesday night.

I was a child Democrat who voted at school for George McGovern in a family that rejected Nixon at his first election, that shifted. In college, my induction to feminism was radical and didn't last except as a metaphoric tattoo. There were age barriers. I was "early," so now I'm "late," "old," though Obama, who is my age, is "young," and the barriers to employment despite affirmative action were fierce. Schools. The way to a job was through a man -- father or husband. The way to a job was through having a family. The way to home ownership was through marriage. I had thought as a younger woman that women globally were a people -- that, in essence, is what feminism practices -- but women, the people said, are also people, not a people.

My favorite women in this election turned out to be the wives of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and their mothers and grandmothers. I joked after Hillary won the popular vote but lost the nomination that I would cast my vote for Michelle Obama. A woman friend, a feminist, who detested Sarah Palin to the point of finding her physically unattractive chided me for the joke. She thought I thought that I could elect Michelle Obama by voting for her husband, that I thought First Lady were an elective, representative post, that I didn't understand politics any better than Sarah Palin, who didn't understand Constitutional democracy. I do understand Constitutional democracy. G-d bless the electoral college. The states will vote. The people voted.

Among other things, the people said they prefer women in the public sphere as the conjugal adjuncts of men leaders. The academic world voted. It said it prefers women as the conjugal adjuncts to men professors. It said it prefers to pay women half or as volunteers, less or nothing for trainings as long and expensive as men's. It said that adjunct wives represent women in the ads and posters of politicians and academics. The newspaper world for me as an editor was similarly family-based.

I happened to see Peggy Noonan and Gloria Steinem, among other important men guests (one who described Hillary as a "soldier" who made 70 appearances for Obama after her loss) on Oprah yesterday. I couldn't help but feel that Oprah let off Republican speech writer Peggy Noonan before she let off Steinem.

I told my younger sister about the show, and she said that it's fine if that's Oprah's opinion, and I said it is not fine, not in any way would it be fine to be Oprah and to excuse the woman who wrote those war and economics and campaign speeches while faulting Gloria Steinem. Steinem has said that women would not be poor if they were paid for caretaking, that women's futures are determined three generations ahead. I said in this economy women are paid by the pound. My sister secretly counts on me to say these things. She reminded me that it is impolite to mention salary details, that naming salaries is rude in polite company.

She told me that her woman friend whose father died of AIDS doesn't believe gay people should raise children. She said her gay man friend isn't having children but is a sperm donor and cares little about gay marriage as a political issue. She said these examples and emotions may determine civil rights.

I said that I remembered being a girl in the backseat of my parents' car in Minneapolis and seeing a black man and white woman cross the street holding hands. The couple were wearing bell bottoms, like me; the man had an afro and the woman had long blond hair, both almost like me.

In our country, we elected a man who is the son of a biracial union. He transcended for enough people the barriers that still exist after decades of struggle and conscientious change. As a parallel, imagine electing the grown daughter of two lesbians. Imagine. But our country has yet to find a woman who transcends for as many people the barriers that still exist despite decades of struggle and conscientious ... attention to details of appearance and fashion and body weight. "Women's concerns," which many people say are elitist or dangerous to democracy itself, may evolve again one day.

Today I salute Michelle Obama for looking beautiful in her dresses and for being curvy. I salute the men's gorgeous faces, their odds, their wives' kind eyes, but mostly, I feel wildly enthusiastic, for the first time in a long time, about change, and about this election's change in particular.

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

I love keeping a blog. I love the reverse chronological nature/order of writing and reading within a blog. I love the convenient circularity of reading "around" at a blog, in an order determined by sudden bursts of interest. I love the one hand clapping.

Many readers & writers ignore blogs. Blogs are discounted for quality, accuracy, and relevance by the very fact of their context as blogs unless they are maintained by a news organization owned by a major company or conglomerate -- these do seem like billboards -- or unless the ethos of the blogger has helped to establish the blog as valuable. The blogger of blogs of serious inquiry -- political and aesthetic and journalistic -- partly establishes his ethos by refusing the personal or quotidien. Avoidance of, lack of interest in, shuddering at the thought of so many people exposing themselves "to the planet" and their sheer number, especially when faced with more important reading duties or possibilities, create an underlying privacy. At my blog there are 18 international and domestic visitors per day. Most of them stay for 00:00 minutes. Rarely, someone stops to read at the blog or comment. Comments remain on the internet permanently and can be like bird droppings to reread later except the most formal and impersonal of them.

Readers of blogs are like birds at a feeder in a yard where a cat lives. They don't nest. They flit from tree to tree. The openness of the blogosphere is like air to a bird. I love birds. I love being a cat trying to espy a bird or a mother who feeds them. I love the openness of the blogosphere.

The difference between an internet journal and a blog is sometimes only technical, like stepping over a chalk line for a door, like flying over a telephone line.

To date, I have "published" 277 posts, of which 48 are draft posts -- including a few photos -- that I have voluntarily and subsequently "removed" while yet preserving them in "draft" form -- "taken down," as if a post were a yard sign or bulletin board or picture hanging at an exhibit instead of a letter with a postage stamp -- concealed from view, really, after having revealed them once or at one time, usually for the sheer pleasure, sense of eagerness, and accomplishment in it. I preserve them for the same reasons.

I view my blog as a book under construction. I don't view myself as a writer captured on the jumbotron. I view myself as someone who paints portraits on the street instead of privately in a studio. Or as a street musician.

At one point, I asked for donations but thought better of it. I tried advertising for Google at the blog and thought better of that.

My blog has a formal appearance with its images of nature. It is a formal experience to work in the blog form. I typically use the word "weblog" to reinforce that formal feeling. Typographically, I have limited options: flush left, center, flush right or right-left justified, bullet lists and block quotes. That affects poetry most.

My reasons when I depost:

Exigencies of print and online publication in journals and books

Distinction between self- and other publishing where other-publishing offers more esteem, privacy, and closure, closure in more than one sense: internet self-publishing is even more like hiding in the open than underground print publishing -- print books and journals have to be special-ordered or purchased at readings and book fairs and are therefore much more difficult to access

A quest for writing in privacy

Fear of revealing too much personal information

Hesitancy to identify people except in a formal way

Self-censorship of other types

Job seeking regardless of type of job

Timing and placement with regard to other posts

Other aesthetic considerations

Proprietary guardianship of writing as work

Other reasons and feelings occur in the process of revision just as in the less immediate ways of writing.

I love the convenience of the entire machine, right down to the template, the generous free hosting, the reliability of the mechanisms, the dailyness of it, the visitations, the sense of audience, the google search lines. One of the search lines yesterday was for "sex in hotel beds ettiquette," a query that led to a post I wrote in Jan. 2006 called "First Sex"; "bondageservice" led to the same post the next day. One from today contains a typo: "sexual prosetics for men." I plan to bring that to the attention of my writer-editor-friends when I next correspond.

Sunday, November 02, 2008

“hoss”: a survey that provides monthly and quarterly statistics on new single-family non-farm house sales

Previous day:

Sonia would quote Oscar Wilde to me in the kitchen at 1747 Kipling, Houston, “If you can’t tell a lie, tell the truth and get it over with.” I wonder now whether I ought to have looked that up then. We didn’t have internet yet, and the library on campus was picked over, like chicken bones, and the public library downtown required underground parking. Think of what guards once did to keep people away from the books. In high school, the “geeks,” as the intellectuals were called, had to cross a line, like a picket line, where cheerleaders and their jock boyfriends sat on the steps in protest of knowledge, to get to the library doors. Call Sonia and ask, “Where did you get the Oscar Wilde quote, the one about truth, get it over with?”

We loved to yak, the truth is, in my kitchen or her living room, aware that her bearded jock poetry boyfriend may not have approved our unsupervised pursuit of intelligence. Our books, not our books for writing (the books we thought we were and would be writing, and more than writing, but sending and publishing, a game still mysterious to us, though we meet people every day who have mastered it, their lines and pages glued together between glossy paper covers for which they did not “pay”) but others’ books, our reading (a fragment). The men forbade books in their non-absolutist way—they agreed that one lesbian should be allowed to disseminate (word)—and recommended the sexual life to the rest of us, to those thin enough for it, instead, as if sex were patriotic, as if the sexual life were the only life they would reward in us, not minding their anger and rage when it came to conflicting lines of ownership, the words they’d slur us with—nice—a number, what we knew in our rental units of “zoning” and “no zoning.”

The men in bidding us to lead the sexual life did not sublimate (Freud).

We didn’t learn “publishing” at school, didn’t learn how to turn “writing” into “books,” or, if we did learn “submissions,” it failed. The pupils at other schools learned more—they learned the books, and they “have” the books. We learned it is better not to. Living, as God said, is paradise (prelapsarian) without the tree.

Save a tree than to publish a book, helper to be a ghost.

Next day:

A few of our compadres in Barthelme’s school were “waiting” to walk through the door of the “establishment.” A car from the service would escort them. Barthelme had died. Someone said talent was not enough. I said if a single thing could be enough, talent then. The quiet surrounding the elections was the quiet of a library or the quiet of the secret service. Were you with “them” or against? Were you one of them or one of the others? Were the others us or against us? Were you “for” war or against it? Were you for Israel or for the Palestinians? Were you an upstart who’d seen a thug from your car window late at night? Did you know whom “pagers” were for? I said pagers were for doctors at the symphony, but someone else—who knew more about new technology than I did—said pagers were for drug sales, drug, not meaning pharmaceutical.

. . .

Years pass, years without remittance, admittance to salary as a professional, years spent swallowing the pills of conformity—I said it was like communion. What had the hoss men said? I focused on my friend’s family in Jerusalem and on my early boyfriend from Haifa. Despite the controversy, the confusion over drug v. non-drug, a pill might be needed to balance the mind/body. But was a war needed to balance the economy? I didn’t think so.

There were poets’ “wars,” waged with toothpicks. The front was not in the South nor in the North. Nor was it out West where the bookstores flourished nor in the East where a tree grew. In Brooklyn? where rent was a little lighter. We were guessing. And what of “the short story,” literary genre that proliferated yet ceased to exist after the “renaissance” of the 1980s? A few of those writers had gone down “early.” Carver had died. An epic novelist, men reasoned, would live longer. A heart attack was reported as a suicide; a suicide in an epic novelist was based on “experimental.” The turnstile let one slide in beside the others; no car would await thee at the airport, but the train would arrive.

Same day (as “next day”):

What I mean is: you—one—could go it on your own, research the mechanics of printing, hire or appoint an editor, see about distribution or wait for someone to ask you, someone kind with a good disposition, someone adept at handling her own affairs; you could litmus test her or more likely, she, you, about the Palestinians. “My tobacconist is one. His wife is from Jordan.” Are there K-marts in Jordan? Can you see Jordan from your flophouse? She could test you on “post-modern*ism*.” You could try a position. You could try a translation. You could post it.

The day after that (after “next day”):

The long interview referenced childbearing. A son before 30 meant two contracts.

Yesterday (the day after “next day”):

The hoss men selected one natural light blonde and two Asian-brunettes for young motherhood and timely publishing. I was a dark Swedish blonde—not gone gray—with a total of four fiancés and a Scottish name meaning “ghost”; “fiancé” could land a redhead a teaching post, but could it land her a son-book on deadline?

It came down to fathers and schools, to alma mater and Dad.

Today (Oct. 14):

I suggest that we discuss L.’s piece as a whole on Oct. 21 and A.’s novel as a whole on Oct. 28 (or later); that will give me a chance to get A.’s whole novel from her. I have chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12. A. gave me chapters a few years ago in MN (that may have changed since then) and another set of chapters—T. says it is chaps 1-4—that she suggested I pass to T. over the summer. How many chapters are there? It’s 350 pp. or so, right?

I’m getting tense as I write this because I also have C.N.’s rapidly changing and unfinished new novel parked on my hard drive and T.M.’s experimental novel. I would consider referring the two of them for an experimental “group.” I’m also supposed to work as editor for two journals and single-handedly publish a chapbook; I haven’t heard from my own chapbook “publisher” in the collective, and I haven’t been paid for this work in years.

The method for novel that I learned from Woiwode is to write straight through once in pencil, without (you or anyone else) reading or rereading it, before rewriting—three months or so for a 350 pp. first draft. To rewrite as many times as needed. To work on the next book while waiting to hear from editors. In the workshop at Binghamton, we met weekly as a group to discuss praxis in a highly focused way without “workshopping” chapters. Larry later read & line-edited all the novels; we heard read aloud every chap. 1 at semester’s end. Then we arranged with individuals to read next drafts as we liked. It was the only novel workshop in the country at the time (‘87) besides Kesey’s at Eugene in collaborative novel.

Gardner had died; he was no experimentalist nor was he short-shrift. People downstate thought “suicide”; everyone upstate knew it was a fluke motorcycle accident, word spelled in Texas with an “x.”

Agents I have little idea. Woiwode partly supported his family in the 60s by publishing in The NYer (his friends were De Niro and Barthelme), so perhaps there was little trouble in his finding one. E.W. met his at a bar. He publishes in Paris and Texas and just got his movie deal. L.R. sold her first novel w/o an agent and didn’t recommend it. B. met “my” agent at the Cedar, but that agent and so many others didn’t want short stories or novellas.

Virginia Woolf wrote her novels in the morning and edited her morning’s work in the afternoon. She and Leonard Woolf self-published as Hogarth Press. How much is “500 pounds” in today’s dollars? A room of one’s own—with a lock from the inside not the outside as in psych hospitals—or no lock needed? Angel At My Table.

Day of a birthday (Oct. 15):

Barthelme had picked G.W. as best, G.W., not G.W.H., who was best at Gardner’s school. Twenty years later, a group of men arranged to get the best of G.W.’s six novels and two short story collections into print. They invested in hardcover. His daughter was already in college by then, his ex- still the subject of controversy if his name arose: I had always thought she was “smart.” All right, some of the women had been strippers, but the ones we knew were smart.

There was an audience for it, for stripping. I had never been to a men’s club; later I queried in my hometown—no writers—about strip joints. Four had double-dated as marrieds there. There were strict laws in MN about the width of the panty fabric. No panty, then a plexiglas window separated patrons from the stripper. I asked to go to one, and P. took me. He was from California. The drinks were expensive and abrasive. Men who looked like they’d been beaten with the pole sat ringside beside women who looked like Henrietta Stackpole. There were two strippers; to call them dancers elevated them but offended ballerinas. One was a teenaged Pacific Islander who draped herself over the pole like a moth; the other was a customized blond high-kicker. A group of four men surrounded the blonde where she sat on the edge of the platform to talk. This was before I had bought clogs, shortened my hair, and grown my hips and thighs. I stood there skinny-as-a-half in “big hair,” ankle boots, and black eyeliner. P. was in radio, not books. He had a sense of humor. I was researching a different man for a novel.

Today (Oct. 21):

We didn’t meet as a group today to discuss and critique the novel and long poem because everyone was writing poetics papers on deadline, leaving me to wonder about the art and practice of writers reading (again). The long poem veils its willingness to be about the poet herself, and like many novels under 300 pages (about the writer under 30) this seems like a long story.

Later the same day (Oct. 21):

V., I gave version 2 (27 pp.) a rest. This is the distillation of 300 pages sans any previously published sections. It has proven to be a pliable form—as I re-read, I’m riveted (even though I wrote it) until I get to a section about Australian birds and neurosis followed by the lake —the whole lake at a glance or that one fish—and “The Dream” and the rest. These are necessary passages (I assume in that I edited cautiously in ‘94 in creating a distillation), but that’s where I flag—around 20 pp. or so. Is it me or did you flag there in reading it, too? I ask because I’d like to keep working it a while if there’s still a little time. The other 270 or so pages are in MN, and this is the second not the first time I wrote so long and left out so much. I suppose it’s a rant—it degenerates and becomes proof of inhumility and ignorance of very large patterns in the world (induction) as a direct response to being in isolation and eventually to breaking down, etc. As a proof it is sort of interesting, I supposed then, but I doubted people might actually follow it as such and just notice “bad writing.” Something reminded me of this recently when I read Tao Lin’s passages from a recent book and could see how transparent and innocent and unaffected and mad the voice was—it’s not that he’s a lousy writer at all but the loneness of the composition and the ambition of the project that created it. If you have a chance, please offer editing ideas for the excerpts of WOWHBS I sent you, and I’ll try to shape it w/o leaping out of the chronological design underlying the full version.

Oct. 23:

After I had left school, I reflected that what I had learned about the business I could write on an index card. I knew of three deals.

The trails in my hometown are marked by signs with universal symbols on them, rather than words. One winter day, when it was bright like spring, and the snow was shrinking in its piles by the road, I returned from the mall on a mission: I had bought ivory gloves, a hat, and a ring. I had written a long story about a young academic in Houston who takes up with a rock ‘n’ roller instead of the man who had offered to marry her, the one who was more like her, because sex with the rock ‘n’ roller was better and more often. In bed with him one day, she realized that he might lie there indefinitely reflecting lyrically about China—the year was 1997—but not buy her an engagement ring, that he would more likely buy her an ice cream. Her school, she realized, might not pay her, and she’d have to pay herself, buy her own shoes from Latin America (she said). The young academic in the story is a poet who rarely writes poems, not a novelist. By then I knew that fictions have a way of coming true—a compelling argument for carefulness, one we followed by model, not one that teachers elaborated due to fear of seeming religious. On the index card about the business, I could have written “truth is stranger than fiction,” but even the tow truck driver might know that. Why go to schools?

After I had completed the beginning of the story, I set out to true it by buying items mentioned in the story—shoes from Latin America, for example, a diamond. I turned over every shoe in the women’s shoe department at the downtown Dayton’s—all of them made in Italy—when the clerk, acting suspicious, came over to supervise me. I ended up buying a shiny pair of Italian black oxfords for $163. I bought diamond earrings next, a half-carat, for $285, reduced from $425. It was my lucky day, the jewelry saleswoman said, and she was almost right.

Deals were usually kept private, with little mention of money; these were not listings for Publisher’s Weekly. I still hadn’t bought the ring, the engagement ring that no man in my real life had seen fit to buy, concerned as he was that it should cost two months’ salary. On the next leg of the mission, I bought a spring stone and diamond ring at the flea market at the mall. I paid $287 for it, reduced from $325. And I bought the ivory gloves and hat. Then I drove in a blaze of sun down the horse trail. I had not noticed the triangular orange sign with the picture of a horse on it. The car bottomed out at the bottom of the first hill, and I walked two miles home, wearing the hat—a woven one that felt like a basket on my head—the ivory gloves and under it the ring. The police were at my house two minutes after I got there, and I had to explain to them how I’d missed seeing the horse sign. Long story short—I never finished the other story as a novel—the sun down, I tipped the tow truck driver $15.

Oct. 24:

It had been lost on me that shoes from Latin America were not available for sale but cocaine was—this was the 1990s; or had cocaine been replaced by speed manufactured in people's houses? Pictures of chemical explosions were on the news; young people had burned their skin. One young man posed under a portrait of Jesus. One young woman's skin would never repair. Her face and body would always look like that—an unmade bed. It was a drug war after the fact. It was the war of a generation, but who knew which generation or what the sides were? Was it Colombia flaming the U.S. with a forest fire of addiction? Was it Canada deluging the U.S. with prescription drugs without prescription? Had it been the C.I.A. looking the other way (but where?) as Honduran exiles sent millions in proceeds from crack cocaine manufacture in California to the Nicaraguan contras? Was it a war against blacks and poor whites to stoke the military and the burgeoning prison complex? John Kerry had stood up to the Senate, but he stood alone. When I voted for him, it was with adoration. “My Crush on Daniel Ortega.”

Let’s talk about “academic unemployment” for writers. Free speech was porn. “I’m sure you’ll have a very interesting novel about academic unemployment,” the agency in Minnesota had written about the story about Frederika, the academic in the novel. “What do you want to be, a rogue journalist?” someone else had asked later when I had applied newspaper editing to writing on the internet. He had published a story in The Washington Post when he was nineteen, a white Republican from a political family at school at Howard in D.C. He dropped out of college to do drugs. Now decades later he was bullying people at AA in PA, a secular Republican opposed to the welfare state, to fat on people’s bodies, and to bipolar disorder, an insurance salesman whose goal was to renovate his farm house and work three days a year. I never met him, but that’s where I sent the beaver.

My short story collection had been returned nine times. It had had the following titles: Table-Talk in 1988; “Hymen” and other stories; Hogging the Lady; The Universal Girl for It, and in 2000, Institute of Tut. I finally stopped sending it when FC2 rejected it.

Fax the Beaver was its last, secret title. The beaver is a dirty trick, and it belongs on the index card. All the 21 stories in the collection have found separate “homes,” as people say in publishing (that and “shepherd,” as if publishing were a gathering of Jews for Jesus), except one about young writers called “Raisins,” one about childhood called “The Hostage,” and one about M.K. called “Hymen.”

“Hymen” ran through workshop three times. It was another writer’s interview piece; it was becoming boilerplate for a textbook. Later it was edited until it was a story about anti-Semitism instead of a story about rednecks in upstate NY, egalitarian rednecks who were vigilantes for choice. That reader’s fear was of the hinterlands. One could hardly blame her that she had not read much in “the paper” about redneck vigilantes for choice nor met one; in fact, she didn’t read the paper, the paper once wrote.

Oct. 25:

Litmus

Last night a group of poets who thought my name was Alison or Susie invited me to eat with them at a Ukrainian restaurant. It was my duty as their guest to remember one fact and “divulge” it regarding my publishing assets. The obvious, though it slipped my attention, is a poem I had recited at a gallery in the Bronx that is to be translated to Ukrainian. I had momentarily forgotten it. The woman with a farmer girl’s blond braids whom I knew by her name and A.S.’s endorsement let me know at table—there were six of us—that I have an internet “presence” that extends beyond explicable borders considering I don’t “have” a book. I “have” a chapbook, I told her stupidly, joyously. Later I compared our internet presences at Google—hers is vast compared to mine and pertains to two books that I could readily locate. She is a visual artist who is also a poet and disagrees with the academic study of poetry. I ought to have praised her for her letter and poem; instead I had praised her past revealed in her letter. I feel like telling her now about the town of La Crosse and the Tom Waits song about heaven. I feel like praising Truck for not showing; I had gotten lost and not shown for a reading in St. Paul and compared it to Arthur Craven’s disappearance. I rarely meet someone in NY who is not a Christian-Buddhist-atheist. The poetry hidden in the underground poetry market sounds gray through a cave of filtered light. The “difference” between internet and “print” is transition.

Oct. 25 (cont’d):

My chapbook in the underground market is a “book” at 30 pp. with color art. She had asked, how are you “there” (on the internet), not are you late, nor why are you here, nor what are you (as the square-faced lady had said on Halloween in ‘90). 56, the traveler. 22, grace. Fiction, I said, not meaning it.

“In Israel, a garrison unit (Hebrew: cheil matzav) is a regular unit defending a specified zone such as a city, a province, a castle or fortress, or even a single building.”

T.C., her mother and I were drinking champagne by the bottle. We had drunk a case of it. We were in for the night, not driving. Outside it was cold, many degrees below zero; with the windchill it was 45 below. The doorbell rang. The dogs barked. T.C.’s mother, G.C., let them in. One of the men was T.C.’s first sex partner in high school. It could take a day to remember his name, and I might confuse him with someone else in high school, create a false attribution. I could place a call to get his name, but I am no longer on friendly terms with T.C. I don’t recall his name, but it was he, the same jock from high school who had broken her. She was not a jock. The nameless jock was tailgated by P.S., a different P.S. than one previously mentioned in this story, not to confuse them. P.S. had been my secret admirer in junior high. He had sent me a box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day in 8th or 9th grade. The nameless jock was in high spirits because he was in the Air Force, about to be deployed to fly a mission over Iraq. He and T.C. hightailed it upstairs, and I stayed downstairs saying “no” to P.S. We must have been pretty drunk. We must have sat there for two hours. I didn’t want to drive in that weather at that hour. P.S. wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, so I left. I drove three miles before the car stopped groaning in the cold. I thought of the word “garrison.” I thought it was on her part like sleeping with the enemy. It was unclear who the enemy was. The enemy was not our military. Knowing her, she thought it was sex in defense of Israel. I thought in her horniness she had not had a choice; I thought in my lack of horniness I had had a choice. It was the first I had heard of a mission over Iraq.

Oct. 31

Halloween

My first thought of the war, then, was of “Israel,” but I abandoned the thought when the war opened in favor of “gasoline.” I had months before that written a short story, “Texas Was Better”— in September 1990 before the war—that begins with a gasoline shortage for boaters. I wrote the story within days of my arrival to Texas from New York in the vein of “what I did on my summer vacation,” but I had, in fact, moved to Texas and was writing as a recent journalist in the vein of a reporter touching foot in a place and writing about it. The “news” in the story is of gasoline prices going up; the rest is a fiction, a poetical investigation of private life, especially of “daydreams.”

- 30 -

November 17

Postscript

Camille Claudel

L.H. would not remember this because she was not in school with us, but I had taken one look at B.P. and said, “no thank you” when the other graduate students urged me to believe that he would or could make or break our careers. A. says I like alcoholics best; here was one I didn’t seem to like. He was an ad man from NY, and, as it turned out, not a very talented poet. I have a stubborn streak. Perhaps B.P. made it for E.W. but broke it for the rest of us. Who among us is tenured? E.W. B.P. is E.W.’s literary executor. Is T.M. tenured? Did T.M. go through B.P.? A. and R.H. say T.M. is a sociopath. Is T.M. “missing”? T.M. got A. her “job.” Is M.M. still “missing”? Why did D.M. and M.M. and A.B. avoid drugs or not encounter them until 1993—into their 30s? What was going on in 1993? That’s when I met G. and saw A. there in her cocktail dress. G. was on coke in high school. A. reminds us that T.M.’s mother was schizophrenic. Am I still missing something? Was I “missing”? I was at home not writing. The therapist said repeatedly to write for therapy only, but it was counter to training, so I sat. Later I wrote about that. Six days at the psych. hospital in Houston, so I missed a few conversations. Do the women who published books remember B.P.? L.M. may be tenured. B.P. was after her time. Is my forgetting B.P. why I said the other day that I have a life, not a career—I have a life, not a cigarette and coffee sobriety?

T. called B.P. the other day and put us on the phone together. We talked about squirrels. I told him that I was making a chapbook for someone in a chapbook collective, and he said that sounded “creative.” Does it? I’m just dropping someone else’s work at the printer and paying for it. I’m not to the point of asking B.P. to read my poems.

A. said only one of the poems in my present chapbook, my second, the poem called “Borgo Was 29 on His Birthday” is glad to be female. A. likes that poem because it has the word “consumerism” in it, my suspicion, not because it is glad to be female. The female speaker remembers for him bec. he forgets—is remembering female? and forgetting male? I thought the rememberer in “Head” enjoys watching him from his ceiling—the man in the poem, who is stoned, yet atoned, in his 10th step, exactly where he started. A.’s husband likes my vanity poem, the one I wrote in 1983 but did not submit or buy until many years later, when I ordered in hardcover for my mother. My first published poem. I remember when I presented it to my mother, I said, “This is not prestigious.” That vanity press had gotten more flack than usual because with W.D. Snodgrass at the helm, and larger cash prizes than most prestigious grants, people might make the mistake of thinking it was prestigious. She laughed because she liked it, anyway. Touch of Tomorrow is the name of the volume.

Gals. Girls. Ladies. T. can’t pronounce the plural and says “woman” for “women.” L., my former “hick” friend whom A. met, says “gals.” So L. sings but doesn’t write. She sings a drastically deep and sonorous form of the blues and tells everyone to kiss her white ass. She’s 5'2" and 105 pounds—wh. is not fat, by the way. She dropped out of college at 79 pounds. She remembers witnessing the rape of her poodle when she was young by a much larger dog, a mutt. Then Coco had one baby. L.’s nose is African as my green eyes. She gets Brazilians. She doesn’t like the Jewish people due to the day the school canceled Christmas. She can’t forget it. She cried over it when she told the story to her Jewish woman friend, a bartender, who couldn’t get enough of her. Many alcoholics in L.’s clan. Her dad was in the bar equipment and the bar business. He died at 32 of a heart attack, but some of the kids said he’d been shot at the airport. She is Catholic/Lutheran but nothing really, which is why it jolted her not to worship Christmas at school. It jolted me less, and I loved the dredel song. We went to Congregational church and had church music there, and my father was in the choir—these two men years later, Mr. Soules, who’d had a brain tumor that had left a stitch near his mouth, and my father, Jack Bogle (not of Vanguard but of Gillette), whose prostate cancer had left him bereft but not without strength for the distance. He died in 1992, six months after my trip to the psych. ward and the same year B.P. got to Houston. His hair had been gorgeous and shiny and jet black. And his father was of Scottish parents and brown.

When Sonia fantasized about mental hospitals, it was the gothic type that she’d seen in Camille Claudel. When A. dreams of it, it is what? The woman the AA group stoned to a pulp was Jewish—why I left. She’d been to Bellevue in high school for downers she’d bought on 14th St. after early rapes. My family went to all lengths to protect her from her violent husband. She ended up “relapsing” on drugs she’d never used before 19 years of AA, heroin for one. T. brags about heroin. He enacts shooting up. Does anyone go to NA? Is NA just plain out of sight? I agreed to go once with a schizophrenic woman pot smoker from AA. Everyone was 17 years old. One man was 40. I said very nervously in that crowd something I wouldn’t say today except at an AA meeting—I was an alcoholic.

Saturday, October 11, 2008

My first thought of the war, then, was of "Israel," but I abandoned the thought when the war opened in favor of "gasoline." I had months before that written a short story, "Texas Was Better" -- in September 1990 before the war -- that begins with a gasoline shortage for boaters. I wrote the story within days of my arrival to Texas from New York in the vein of "what I did on my summer vacation," but I had, in fact, moved to Texas and was writing as a recent journalist in the vein of a reporter touching foot in a place and writing about it. The "news" in the story is of gasoline prices going up; the rest is a fiction, a poetical investigation of private life, especially of "daydreams."

- 30 -

Oct. 30

Garrison

New Year's Eve-to-New Year's Day, 1991.

"In Israel, a garrison unit (Hebrew: חיל מצב; cheilmatzav) is a regular unit defending a specified zone such as a city, a province, a castle or fortress, or even a single building."

T.C., her mother and I were drinking champagne by the bottle. We had drunk a case of it. We were in for the night, not driving. Outside it was cold, many degrees below zero; with the windchill it was 45 below. The doorbell rang. The dogs barked. T.C.'s mother, G.C., let them in. One of the men was T.C.'s first sex partner in high school. It could take a day to remember his name, and I might confuse him with someone else in high school, create a false attribution. I could place a call to get his name, but I am no longer on friendly terms with T.C. I don't recall his name, but it was he, the same jock from high school who had broken her. She was not a jock. The nameless jock was tailgated by P.S., a different P.S. than one previously mentioned in this story, not to confuse them. P.S. had been my secret admirer in junior high. He had sent me a box of chocolates on Valentine's Day in 7th-9th grade. The nameless jock was in high spirits because he was in the Air Force, about to be deployed to fly a mission over Iraq. He and T.C. hightailed it upstairs, and I stayed downstairs saying "no" to P.S. We must have been pretty drunk. We must have sat there for two hours. I didn't want to drive in that weather at that hour. P.S. wouldn't take "no" for an answer, so I left. I drove three miles before the car stopped groaning in the cold. I thought of the word "garrison." I thought it was on her part like sleeping with the enemy. It was unclear who the enemy was. The enemy was not our military. Knowing her, she thought it was sex in defense of Israel. I thought in her horniness she had not had a choice; I thought in my lack of horniness I had had a choice. It was the first I had heard of a mission over Iraq.

My chapbook in the underground market is a "book" at 30 pp. with color art. She had asked, how are you "there" (on the internet), not are you late, nor why are you here, nor what are you,as the square-faced lady had said on Halloween*. 56, the traveler. 22, grace. Fiction, I said, not meaning it.

Oct. 25:

Litmus

Last night a group of poets who thought my name was Alison or Susie invited me to eat with them at a Ukrainian restaurant. It was my duty as their guest to remember one fact and "divulge" it regarding my publishing assets. The obvious, though it slipped my attention, is a poem I had recited at a gallery in the Bronx that is to be translated to Ukrainian. I had momentarily forgotten it. The woman with a farmer girl's blond braids whom I knew by her name and A.S.'s endorsement let me know at table -- there were six of us -- that I have an internet "presence" that extends beyond explicable borders considering I don't "have" a book. I "have" a chapbook, I told her stupidly, joyously. Later I compared our internet presences at Google -- hers is vast compared to mine and pertains to two books that I could readily locate. She is a visual artist who is also a poet and disagrees with the academic study of poetry. I ought to have praised her for her letter and poem; instead I had praised her past revealed in her letter. I feel like telling her now about the town of La Crosse and the Tom Waits song about heaven. I feel like praising Truck for not showing; I had not shown for a reading in St. Paul and compared it to Arthur Craven's disappearance. I rarely meet someone in NY who is not a Christian-Buddhist-atheist. The poetry hidden in the underground poetry market sounds gray through a cave of filtered light. The "difference" between internet and "print" is transition.

Oct. 24:

It had been lost on me that shoes from Latin America were not available for sale but cocaine was -- this was the 1990s; or had cocaine been replaced by speed manufactured in people's houses -- pictures of chemical explosions were on the news; young people had burned their skin. One young man posed under a portrait of Jesus. One young woman's skin would never repair. Her face and body would always look like that -- an unmade bed. It was a drug war after the fact. It was the war of a generation, but who knew which generation or what the sides were? Was it Colombia flaming the U.S. with a forest fire of addiction? Was it Canada using the internet to deluge the U.S. with prescription drugs without a prescription? Had it been the C.I.A. turning its back on crack cocaine manufacture in California while Honduran exiles sent millions in proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras? Was it a war against blacks and poor whites to help stoke the military and the burgeoning prison complex? John Kerry had stood up to the Senate, but he stood alone. When I voted for him, it was with adoration. "My Crush on Daniel Ortega."

Let's talk about "academic unemployment" for writers. Free speech was porn. "I'm sure you'll have a very interesting novel about academic unemployment," the agency in Minnesota had written about the story about Frederika, the academic in the novel. "What do you want to be, a rogue journalist?" someone else had asked later when I had applied newspaper editing to writing on the internet. He had published a story in The Washington Post when he was nineteen, a white Republican -- from a political family -- at school at Howard in D.C. He dropped out of college to do drugs. Now decades later he was bullying people at A.A. in PA, a secular Republican opposed to the welfare state, to fat on people's bodies, and to bipolar disorder, an insurance salesman whose goal was to renovate his farm house and work three days a year. I never met him, but that's where I sent the beaver.

My short story collection had been returned nine times. It had had the following titles: Table-Talk in 1988; "Hymen" and other stories; Hogging the Lady; The Universal Girl for It, and in 2000, Institute of Tut. I finally stopped sending it when FC2 rejected it.

Fax the Beaver was its last, secret title. The beaver is a dirty trick, and it belongs on the index card. All the 21 stories in the collection have found separate "homes," as people say in publishing (that and "shepherd," as if publishing were a gathering of Jews for Jesus), except one about young writers called "Raisins," one about childhood called "The Hostage," and one about M.K. called "Hymen."

"Hymen" ran through workshop three times. It was another writer's interview piece; it was becoming boiler plate for a textbook. Later it was edited until it was a story about anti-semitism instead of a story about rednecks in upstate NY, egalitarian rednecks who were vigilantes for choice. That reader's fear was of the hinterlands. One could hardly blame her that she had not read much in "the paper" about redneck vigilantes for choice nor met one; in fact, she didn't read the paper, the paper once wrote.

Oct. 23:

After I had left school, I reflected that what I knew of the business I could write on an index card. I had heard about three deals.

The trails in my hometown are marked by signs with universal symbols on them, rather than words. One winter day, when it was bright like spring, and the snow was shrinking in its piles by the road, I returned from the mall on a mission: I had bought ivory gloves, a hat, and a ring. I had written a long story about a young academic in Houston who takes up with a rock 'n' roller instead of the man who had offered to marry her, the one who was more like her, because sex with the rock ‘n’ roller was better and more often. In bed with him one day, she realized that he might lie there indefinitely reflecting lyrically about China – the year was 1997 – but not buy her an engagement ring, that he would more likely buy her an ice cream. Her school, she realized, might not pay her, and she’d have to pay herself, buy her own shoes from Latin America (she said). The young academic in the story is a poet who rarely writes poems, not a novelist. By then I knew that fictions have a way of coming true -- a compelling argument for carefulness, one that teachers didn’t elaborate due to fear of seeming religious. On the index card about the business, I could have written “truth is stranger than fiction,” but even the tow truck driver might know that. Why go to expensive schools? After I had completed the beginning of the story, I set out to true it by buying items mentioned in the story – shoes from Latin America, for example, a diamond. I turned over every shoe in the women’s shoe department at the downtown Dayton’s – all of them made in Italy – when the clerk, acting suspicious, came over to supervise me. I ended up buying a shiny pair of Italian black oxfords for $163. I bought diamond earrings next, a half carat, for $285, reduced from $425. It was my lucky day, the jewelry saleswoman said, and she was almost right. Deals were usually kept private, with little mention of money; these were not listings for Publisher’s Weekly. I still hadn’t bought the ring, the engagement ring that no man in my real life had seen fit to buy, concerned as he was that it should cost two months’ salary. On the next leg of the mission, I bought a spring stone and diamond ring at the flea market at the mall. I paid $287 for it, reduced from $325. And I bought the ivory gloves and hat. Then I drove in a blaze of sun down the horse trail. I had not noticed the triangular orange sign with the picture of a horse on it. The car bottomed out at the bottom of the first hill, and I walked two miles home, wearing the hat – a woven one that felt like a basket on my head – the ivory gloves and under it the ring. The police were at my house two minutes after I got there, and I had to explain to them how I’d missed seeing the horse sign. Long story short -- I never finished the other story as a novel -- the sun down, I tipped the tow truck driver $15.

Later the same day (Oct. 21):

V., I gave version 2 (27 pp.) a rest. This is the distillation of 300 pages sans any previously published sections. It has proven to be a pliable form -- as I re-read, I'm riveted (even though I wrote it) until I get to a section about Australian birds and neurosis followed by the lake -- the whole lake at a glance or that one fish -- and "The Dream" and the rest. These are necessary passages (I assume, based on the fact that I edited cautiously in '94 in creating a distillation), but that's where I flag -- around 20 pp. or so. Is it me or did you flag there in reading it, too? I ask because I'd like to keep working it a while if there's still a little time. The other 270 or so pages are in MN, and this is the second not the first time I wrote so long and left out so much. I suppose it's a rant -- it degenerates and becomes proof of inhumility and ignorance of very large patterns in the world (induction) as a direct response to being in isolation and eventually to breaking down, etc. As a proof it is sort of interesting, I supposed then, but I doubted people might actually follow it as such and just notice "bad writing." Something reminded me of this recently when I read Tao Lin's passages from a recent book and could see how transparent and innocent and unaffected and mad the voice was -- it's not that he's a lousy writer at all but the loneness of the composition and the ambition of the project that created it. If you have a chance, please offer editing ideas for the excerpts of WOWHBS I sent you, and I'll try to shape it w/o leaping out of the chronological design underlying the full version.

Today (Oct. 21):

We didn't meet as a group today to discuss and critique the novel and long poem because everyone was writing poetics papers on deadline, leaving me to wonder about the art and practice of writers reading (again). The long poem veils its willingness to be about the poet herself, and like many novels under 300 pages (about the writer under 30) this seems like a long story.

Day of a birthday (Oct. 15):

Barthelme had picked GW as best, GW, not GWH. A group of men arranged to get the best of his seven novels into print. They invested in hardcover. His daughter was already in college by then, his ex- still the subject of controversy if his name arose: I had always thought she was "smart." All right, some of the women had been strippers, but the ones we knew were smart. There was an audience for it, for stripping. I had never been there, to a men's club; later I queried in my hometown -- no writers -- about strip joints. Four had double-dated as marrieds there. There were strict laws in MN about the width of the panty fabric. No panty, then a plexiglass window separated patrons from the stripper. I asked to go to one, and P. took me. He was from California. The drinks were expensive and abrasive. Men who looked like they'd been beaten with the pole sat ringside beside women who looked like Henrietta Stackpole. This was before I had bought clogs, shortened my hair, and grown my hips and thighs. I stood there skinny-as-a-half in "big hair," ankle boots, and black eyeliner. P. was in radio, not books. He had a sense of humor. I was researching a different man for a novel.

Today (Oct. 14):

I suggest that we discuss L.'s piece as a whole on Oct. 21 and A.'s novel as a whole on Oct. 28 (or later); that will give me a chance to get A.'s whole novel from her. I have chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12. A. gave me chapters a few years ago in MN (wh. may have changed since then) and another set of chapters -- T. says it is chaps 1-4 -- which she suggested I pass to T. over the summer. How many chapters are there? It's 350 pp. or so, right?

I'm getting tense as I write this because I also have C.N.'s rapidly changing and unfinished new novel parked on my hard drive and T.L.'s experimental novel. I would consider referring the two of them for an experimental "group." I'm also supposed to work as editor for two journals and single-handedly publish a chapbook; I haven't heard a word from my own chapbook "publisher" in the collective, and I haven't been hired for this kind of work in years.

The method for novel that I learned from Woiwode is to write straight through once in pencil, without (you or anyone else) reading or rereading it, before rewriting -- three months or so for a 350 pp. first draft. To rewrite as many times as needed. To work on the next book while waiting to hear from editors. In the workshop at Binghamton, we met weekly as a group to discuss praxis in a highly focused way without "workshopping" chapters. Larry later read & line-edited all the novels; we heard read aloud every chap. 1 at semester's end. Then we arranged with individuals to read next drafts as we liked. It was the only novel workshop in the country at the time ('87) besides Kesey's at Eugene in collaborative novel.

Gardner had died; he was no experimentalist nor was he short-shrift. People downstate thought "suicide"; everyone upstate knew it was a fluke motorcycle accident, word spelled in Texas with an "x."

Agents, I have little idea. Woiwode supported his family in the 60s by publishing in The NYer (his friends were De Niro and Barthelme), so perhaps there was little trouble in his finding one. E.W. met his at a bar. He publishes in Paris and Texas and just got his movie deal. L.R. sold her first novel w/o an agent and didn't recommend it. B. met "my" agent at a bar, but that agent and so many others didn't want short stories or novellas.

Virginia Woolf wrote her novels in the morning and edited her morning's work in the afternoon. Also, they self-published as Hogarth Press. How much is "500 pounds" in today's dollars? A room of one's own -- with a lock from the inside not the outside as in psych hospitals -- or no lock needed? Angel At My Table.

Yesterday (the day after "next day"):

The hoss men selected one natural light blonde and two Asian-brunettes for young motherhood and timely publishing. I was a dark Swedish blonde -- not gone gray -- with a total of four fiances and a Scottish name meaning "ghost"; "fiance" could land a redhead a teaching post, but could it land her a son-book on deadline?

It came down to fathers and schools, to alma mater and Dad.

The day after that (after "next day"):

The long interview referenced childbearing. A son before 30 meant two contracts.

Same day (as "next day"):

What I mean is: you -- one -- could go it on your own, research the mechanics of printing, hire or appoint an editor, see about distribution or wait for someone to ask you, someone kind with a good disposition, someone adept at handling her own affairs; you could litmus test her or more likely, she, you, about the Palestinians. "My tobacconist is one. His wife is from Jordan." Are there K-marts in Jordan? Can you see Jordan from your house? You could try a position. You could test her on "post-modern*ism*." You could try a translation. You could post it.

Next day:

A few of our compadres in Barthelme's school were "waiting" to walk through the door of the "establishment." A car from the service would escort them. Barthelme had died. Someone said talent was not enough. I said if a single thing could be enough, talent then. The quiet surrounding the elections was the quiet of a library or the quiet of the secret service. Were you with "them" or against? Were you one of them or one of the others? Were the others us or against us? Were you "for" war or against it? Were you for Israel or for the Palestinians? Were you an upstart who'd seen a thug from your car window late at night? Did you know whom "pagers" were for? I said pagers were for doctors at the symphony, but someone else -- who knew more about new technology than I did -- said pagers were for drug sales, drug, not meaning pharmaceutical.

Years pass, years without remittance, admittance to salary as a professional, years spent swallowing the pills of conformity -- I said it was like communion. What had the hoss men said? I focused on my friend's family in Jerusalem and on my early boyfriend who was from Haifa. Despite the controversy, the confusion over drug v. non-drug, a pill might be needed to balance the mind/body. But was a war needed to balance the economy? I didn't think so.

There were poets' "wars," waged with toothpicks. The front was not in the South nor in the North. Nor was it out West where the bookstores flourished nor in the East where a tree grew. In Brooklyn? where rent was a little lighter. We were guessing. And what of "the short story," literary genre that proliferated yet ceased to exist after the "renaissance" of the 1980s? A few of those writers had gone down "early." Carver had died. An epic novelist, the pre-authors reasoned, would live longer. A heart attack was reported as a suicide, despite frequent truth drilling; a suicide in an epic novelist was based on "experimental." The turnstile let one slide in beside the others; no car would await thee at the airport, but the train would arrive.

Previous day:

Sonia would quote Oscar Wilde to me, "if you can't tell a lie, tell the truth and get it over with." I wonder now whether I ought to have looked that up then, in the kitchen at 1747 Kipling, Houston. We didn't have internet yet, and the library on campus was picked over, like chicken bones, and the public library downtown required underground parking. Think of what guards once did to keep people away from the books. In high school, the "geeks," as the intellectuals were called, had to cross a line, like a picket line, where cheerleaders and their jock boyfriends sat on the steps in protest of knowledge, to get to the library doors. Call Sonia and ask, "Where did you get the Oscar Wilde quote, the one about truth, get it over with?"

We loved to yak, the truth is, in my kitchen or her living room, aware that her boyfriend may not have approved of our unsupervised pursuit of intelligence. Our books, not our books for writing (the books we thought we were and would be writing, and more than writing, but sending and publishing, a game still mysterious to us, though we meet people every day who have mastered it, their lines and pages glued together between glossy paper covers for which they did not "pay") but others' books, our reading (a fragment). The men forbade books in their non-absolutist way -- they agreed that one lesbian ought to be allowed to disseminate (word) -- and recommended the sexual life to the rest of us, to those thin enough for it, instead, as if sex were patriotic, as if the sexual life were the only life they would reward in us, not minding their anger and rage when it came to conflicting lines of ownership, the words they'd slur us with, a number, what we knew in our rental units of "zoning" and "no zoning."

The men in bidding us to lead the sexual life did not sublimate (Freud).

We didn't learn "publishing" at school, didn't learn how to turn "writing" into "books," or, if we did learn "submissions," it failed. The pupils at other schools learned more -- they learned the books, and they "have" the books. We learned it is better not to. Living, as God said, is paradise (prelapsarian) without the tree.